Bingi Media & Film Studios present Cajetan Boy (Reverend), Arabron Nyyeneque (Amigo), Robert Agengo (Pablo), Mwaura Bilal (Biggie), Andrew Kamau (Mustafa), Shiviske Shivisi (Dakari/ Leah), Ywayais Xavier (Majuju). Director, Victor Gatonye; Director of Photography, Enos Olik; Executive Producers, Cutha Gathere, Moira D. Petricore, Ken O. Sara, Anthony Macharia, Kevin Muley; Producers, Sarah Hassan, Fakii Liwali, Betty M. Mutua; Screenplay by Voline Ogutu. © 2020
“Redix “Malorum est cupiditas”
This story is about greed, and I must start with the grand ol’ Pardoner’s Tale of greed. Three young drunkards were about the revenge of their friend’s death, and they set out to look for death and kill him. On their way, they ran into an old man who told them where death could be found under a tree. When they got there, they found a large deposit of gold. Finders keepers. They decide to spend the night and share the find in the morning. Yet they sent the youngest of them into town to buy them drink so they can celebrate. He bought the wine and laced it with poison so that his friends could drink and die. Upon his arrival, his friends had planned his death too, and they jumped him and killed him. They celebrated by drinking the poisoned wine. They, too, died.
If we have ever been fortunate to watch (The Treasure of Sierra Madre) 1948, which is about greed also, you should understand 40 Sticks. Passed the characteristic of desire, the two films have the same themes. However, I mention greed because the characters of both films are eaten up by human flaws-greed. In 40 Sticks, once the ill-begotten fortune is found, they shot one of them, though, she didn’t die. In The Treasure…, lack of trust destroys the three gold-seekers: Human weaknesses: greed, betrayal, and conscience are present in the characters of The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
In their quest to look for gold, the three men, Curtin (Tim Holt), Howard (Walter Houston), and Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), are asked by a bunch of Bandidos to surrender their guns but were saved in the nick of time by Mexican forces. The Indians forced Walter to help with a cure for a sick boy in another village. When Curtin and Dobbs are left alone, Dobbs becomes paranoid, thinking Curtin will steal his gold share, so he kills Curtin. Now alone, he runs into Bandidos with an empty gun, and they killed him with machetes. When they look in his bag, they found that the gold dust has all but wafted in the wind.
Why do I have to use this film as a digression? The five hardcore criminals, Pablo (Robert Agengo), Biggie (Mwaura Bilal), Mustafa (Andrew Kamau), Dakari /Leah) and Majuju (Ywayais Xavier) had just pulled a million-dollar heist when Pablo wasted four shots into Leah. Now they want her liquidated so the four all-male crooks can share the loot. No sooner had Pablo puts the haul away in a safe hiding place than they all were rounded up by the law and sent to prison. Three minutes into the story, prison authorities transfer eight criminals from prison #40 to Kivu for executions.
The trip to Kivu is an ordeal comparable to purgatory. They are eight prisoners in number loaded in the prison van commandeered by Amigo (Arabron Nyyeneque). Among them in the truck is the mass-murderer who machine gun down thirty people in a mall. There is another, a pedophile, who sexually abused eight years old girl before killing her. Another reverend, so he called himself, who, like the Jonestown pastor, let his congregants commit mass suicide by drinking poison, and all died. He sent them to a better place, he says. And when he shall follow, chariots of gold shall herald him to the gate of heaven. Undercover, Leah/Dakari finds her way in the truck disguised as a prison ward, which none of her former partners suspected.
En route, and fifteen Kilometers away from Kivu, a disabled gas truck blocks their path, and they are forced to reroute through an offbeat road. Not long, the truck’s front tires ran over spikes in the road that caused them punctured, and the van hit a tree. Meanwhile, two other convicts in an SUV who had been hired to waylay the prison truck, to free the prisoners themselves get lost in the forest. And meanwhile too, the eight prisoners in van 40 attempt holding hostage, Dakari/Leah. Every time they attempt, they are outsmarted by Amigo. At one point, he orders the prisoners out of the van to push it out of a ditch, a hand of a prisoner’s left hanging on the chain, but his body was nowhere.
Terrified, they all shuffled back into the van, yelling. Pablo uses Dakari’s pistol and shoots Amigo dead. Soon, after dark, one prisoner gets slaughtered, then another, and another and another until Majuju, Mustafa, Pablo, and Biggie are left. Since the reverend is the last yet slithered by this mysterious killer, and besides the anxiety in everybody as to who else shall be next, they turn to accuse one another of the killings. Mustafa, of course, made light of the reverend’s death.
“At least they finally killed the most annoying person on this planet. Right?” Majuju slaps Mustafa for accusing him of having slithered the reverend’s throat, and there’s a tussle. “I was wrong. This is not Majuju. You are too crazy…me, I think it’s Pablo. Ask yourselves why he doesn’t want to show where the safe house is? So, how the safe house is connected to the murders? ’Cause, you don’t want to split the money…you telling us one by one, so you can keep all the money after everyone is dead.
“Majuju add more papers to the fire,” Pablo commanded, avoiding the accusation while brewing with anger.
“He has a point. Why don’t you want to tell us where the safe house is?” Biggie, too, asks Pablo.
“Because I don’t trust you guys. Nothing prevents you from killing me as soon as you know where the money is.”
“I’ve been in this street with you since I left high school, now you look at me, that you don’t trust me? How many years have we known each other?”
“Yet, the murderer is still here in this van.”
At this point, all three of them turn their heads in Mustafa’s direction.
Pablo gets up and wants to shoot Mustafa in his face, and Biggie and Majuju stop him. Panic sets in among them when Biggie lights the match, Majuju was slithered. Mustafa breaks from the handcuff, takes the gun, and puts Pablo and Biggie at gunpoint. He confesses to them, he had compromised with the police and therefore granted a lighter prison term. He throws the keys for the handcuff away and runs from the scene but not long after, we heard him shriek for whatever might have happened to him.
Pablo and Biggie are the only two left in the van in handcuffs. It is obvious the two shall die any time now and shall die by slithering.
“Biggie listen, if something happens to me, I want you to take my share of the money and give it to Stacey. I hid the money in Lake View. Are you listening? 2321 is the house number…under the big tree. I don’t even want that money. Maybe it’s good that things happen like this. I don’t want to be in my daughter’s life like this.”
Before long, Biggi’s throat gets slithered by the mysterious killer. By now, Pablo knows it is his turn to face death. He runs from the van but falls in the mud, and as he turns around, he sees the killer standing over him with a knife blade drawn. “So, it was you.” Was the last word he says. In the morning, the villagers found him lynched and hanged way up in the tree, dead.
Dakari claims the money bags from under the tree. And as she gets away:
“To my unborn, saying I’m sorry is not enough, saying I miss you is not enough, but I need you to rest now, baby girl because mum has paid your debt in full.”
Volin Ogutu, the screenwriter, tells a beautiful story of greed here. He describes it in a form that the culprits face a reckoning before their deaths. I mentioned purgatory earlier in this review. I meant the miserable and inescapable situation the screenwriter put his characters in. It could be compared to what both Popes John Paul 11 and Benedict XV1 maintained: purgatory does not indicate a place but its the condition of existence. “The reverend might have been speaking the truth. Maybe it’s our sins that are killing us…all those people we have stolen from…Maybe it’s true sir, God is punishing us,” Biggie confesses to his sin before his throat is slithered.
At the top of this review, the Latin proverb means, “Greed is the root of evil.”